The recent wave of revolutions across the Arab world has brought to the surface the contradictions in popular understandings of the Middle East and North Africa. The place of the region in the global history of modernity has been unsettled yet again. It is possible to identify several major trends in responses to the momentous events, coinciding with various stages in the unfolding of the revolutions. Firstly, many commentators embraced the early stages of the…
If modernity represents both a rupture with the past and a culmination of all previous history at the same time, if modernity constantly reorganizes the world to reflect the reality it creates, no other institution embodies that phenomenon better than the public museum, whose main purpose since its creation in the late eighteenth century has been to organize and represent time, progress and history. Because of its involvement with art, a key concept in the…
